When The Walls Had Ears: The Secret history Of Latimer House

Nestled in the Chess Valley in Buckinghamshire, not far from Chalfont and Latimer Metropolitan Line station, is an attractive red-brick, neo-Tudor mansion.

Called Latimer House, the site has a history stretching back centuries as an aristocratic manor house. It also has an extraordinary World War Two story, when it was used to house, and extract vital information from, German prisoners of war. 

Today it is a hotel, so I was invited to visit and learn all about the story behind it. 

Medieval Origins

Records show a manor house of some description at this site going all the way back to 1194AD. In 1331 the house was leased to William Latimer, 3rd Baron Latimer and lived in by his descendants.

In 1615 it was bought by William Cavendish, 1st Earl of Devonshire and, again, subsequently passed down through the family. For example, it was the home of William Cavendish, the 3rd Earl of Devonshire (1617-1684).

He was created a Knight of the Bath at Charles I’s coronation in 1625 and was a key Royalist in the run up to English civil war. In July 1642 he was expelled from the House of Lords and ordered to the Tower of London. He, however, fled England and his estates were briefly sequestered. He returned to England in 1645, was pardoned, fined and lived, essentially in custody, at Latimer House with his mother Christian. They entertained Charles I for a night during the civil war on the 13th October 1645. Charles II also stayed before fleeing to live in exile on the continent.

At the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, William regained his former positions.

The Current Building

A fire destroyed the Elizabethan property and the current building was constructed from 1834-1838, designed by Edward Blore for Charles Compton Cavendish (1793-1863).

Edward Blore is best known for completing the work of John Nash to Buckingham Palace in the 1830s. In 1847 he designed the Eastern frontage, facing the Mall, which was later covered by Aston Webb. He also worked on Lambeth Palace and St James’s Palace.

Many of the Cavendish family are buried in the church of St Mary Magdalene, not far from the house.

The church was also rebuilt by Blore and later enlarged and redesigned by George Gilbert Scott in 1867. Scott had spent a year as a teenager living with his uncle, Samuel King, the Rector of Latimer, in the Old Rectory opposite. George Gilbert Scott is best known for designing the Midland Grand Hotel by St Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial. 

An Amazing World War Two Story

In 1940 Latimer House was requisitioned by the Secret Intelligence Services for a very important purpose. It became one of three old aristocratic manor houses that were used to house German prisoners of war and extract information from them. 

The other two were Trent Park in Cockfosters and Wilton Park, also in Buckinghamshire and operated by the ‘Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Unit (CSDIC)’, set up by MI5 and MI6. 

Latimer House was known as ‘No.1 Distribution Centre’, to mask it as a supply depot. Locals, press, even Parliament, did not know about its true function. From May 1942 Latimer House became especially important as the headquarters of the CSDIC. 

The division was headed up by Colonel Thomas Kendrick (1881-1972), a senior figure in MI6.

An extraordinary character, Kendrick had fought in both the Boer War and the First World War and in the 1920s and 1930s was MI6’s most senior spymaster in Europe.

From 1938 he was head of the Vienna Station for MI6. His cover in Vienna was that he was a passport control officer and he bravely and brilliantly used his position to help thousands of Austrian Jews escape Austria after the German annexation. It is thought he saved up to 10,000 lives. He issued fake visas and passports, to get around the British Government trying to restrict immigration into the country.

The Set Up 

The house and surrounding cells were bugged and Kendrick worked with both British-born German speakers, but also over a hundred German-speaking Jewish refugees to listen in to the prisoners’ conversations and gain invaluable information. 

At Latimer, for example, Churchill gave an unlimited budget to convert Latimer House for this purpose. The money was spent on constructing an administration block, an interrogation room and cells to keep the lower ranking prisoners.

They often put prisoners together from different areas of the German army to encourage information sharing. The cells were then bugged and the ‘M Room’ (Microphone room), was set up where the secret listeners were stationed listening in and recording what they heard. They worked 12 hours a day, every day and over 100,000 conversations were recorded.

A central tower with gun-slits overlooked the complex, known as ‘The Spider’. The whole site was protected by a barbed wire fence and two entry checkpoints. 

unconventional Methods

The mansion was used as the Officers’ Mess. Kendrick realised that to extract information from the Germans, he would want them relaxed and off-guard. The German officers were occasionally taken on walks in the grounds, for example they were known to walk them up a path called the King’s Walk, that you can still walk along today. The aim was to build up trust and respect between the two men and also that, in the relaxed surroundings, they might share more information.  

Below is a photograph of the library today. This is where Kendrick would have met his intelligence officers to discuss material being extracted in the bugging operation. Churchill also visited Kendrick at Latimer House towards the end of the war.

Latimer was generally used to keep captured U-Boat submarine crews and Luftwaffe pilots, who were bugged for up to a fortnight before being moved on to more conventional prisoner of war camps.

A Fake Lord And Garden Parties

Trent Park, one of the other houses, was used to house the German generals, for the duration of the war. They were given the star treatment, encouraged to treat the place like a gentleman’s club, playing billiards, painting, playing cards and table tennis.

They had garden parties, plied with whiskey and even taken to restaurants such as Simpsons in the Strand in London. When Churchill found out about the latter he was outraged and ordered Kendrick to stop the ‘pampering of the generals’. 

At Trent Park an intelligence officer called Ian Munroe fashioned a fake persona called ‘Lord Aberfeldy’.

He told German officers he was a distant cousin of King George VI and was in charge of their welfare. Munroe would buy them little extras such as boot polish, cigarettes or wine. He would escort them on walks and chat to them under a tree that was bugged with a microphone. Being looked after by a ‘Lord’ played up to their egos.

On A Par With Bletchley Park

Historic England now apparently put the three locations and the information they uncovered on a par with the code-breaking operation at Bletchley Park in terms of the importance of the sites to the war effort. Probably most notably, for example, information was acquired about Hitler’s secret rocket programme. This led to the bombing and destruction of a V2 rocket launching site at Peenemunde on the North coast of Germany in May 1943, that had been gearing up to launch hundreds of deadline rockets at Britain. 

A BBC article from 2013 says that there were two secret listeners left alive that we know of. One was Fritz Lustig, who passed away in 2017.

Fritz arrived in Britain in April 1939 after fleeing the Nazi persecution of the Jews and ended up working for Kendrick. He remembered the excitement of overhearing information crucial to the war effort, but also the difficulty in hearing prisoners discussing and sometimes boasting about their role in atrocities and the concentration camps. It is worth adding as well, that before he worked for the intelligence services he had been arrested along with 30,000 other German refugees as an ‘enemy alien’ and interned on the Isle of Man. 

You can read his fascinating obituary here.

A Very High Ranking Nazi

On the 10th May 1941 Hitler’s deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, the highest ranking German prisoner of war ever held in Britain, crashed his plane in Scotland whilst on a solo mission. Oral tradition states that he spent a bit of time at Latimer House in 1942 before being transferred to Wales.

He was travelling to try and negotiate a peace and end the war with Britain, but there is still a lot of debate about the purpose of the mission and whether it was carried out with Hitler’s knowledge or approval. Intriguingly it is said that he was kept in the room next to Kendrick’s in Latimer House. 

After the War and The Secret Tunnel 

After the war Latimer House was, much to the dismay of the Earl of Chesham, retained by the government. It became a joint Defence Training College and, later, many apparently believe that it possibly became a training camp for MI6 officers in the Cold War. 

When the estate was purchased from the government in the 1980s an unusual clause was added to the conveyance. It stated that a wall in the basement, thought to lead to a secret tunnel, was not to be touched for 50 years. When I was being shown around the hotel, the member of staff had told me this had recently been extended by the Government for another 25 years. 

Today, as I say, it is a hotel owned by De Vere, called De Vere Latimer Estate. As well as the history, is a great place to stay, with some lovely local walks on the doorstep.

Find out more about the hotel and its facilities here. 

For more information on the three locations and intelligence gathering in the war, I can recommend definitely reading Dr Helen Fry’s, The Walls Have Ears.

Thank you for reading, more incredible historic spots below.